Thursday, 24 September 2015

Good Heavens, Water Falling from the Sky!

Here in the Northern Sporades in the last few days we have
been having the first heavy rains of Autumn. People — Greek people anyway —
have been throwing their hands up in shocked, horrified surprise; streets have
turned into rivers, water has gushed over the thresholds of their houses and
dripped in through gaps in the roof, and of course the electricity supply has
failed. ‘Simon, Simon, what on earth is going on?’

The heavy rains have come, in my own personal experience, at
about this time every year for the last thirty-five years, and I somehow think
much the same has been happening for many thousands of years. Of course, no-one
expects Greeks to be actually prepared for
the event; to have taken precautions such as fixing holes in the roof beforehand, (I should admit to being
sufficiently Greek by now to have failed to fix a couple of leaks in my own
roof), nor do we expect the electricity company to even consider making the
supply weather-proof. That would be quite contrary to all we know, or think we
know, of Greece and Greeks. But the horrified surprise? Just how many thousands
of years does it take for people to get used to a regular annual event?